Session 94 - New Dynamics and Views of the Solar System.Oral session, Wednesday, January 15Frontenac Ballroom,

[94.01] Recent Insights into the Dynamics and Evolution of the Solar System

K. A. Innanen (York Univ.)

The modern era of fast digital computers and the exploration and
mapping of the Solar System have produced a renaissance in celestial
mechanics. Spectular progress has been made in the numerical methods that
are necessary for the efficient simulation of n-body systems, as well as
in algebraic manipulators.
A good starting point is the work on the Giant Planets as a system, and
its interplay with with short and long-period comets, the Oort Cloud, the
local Galactic environment, and, the Kuiper Belt. The presence of
many resonances in the Solar System has long been suspected to have great
significance for its long-term behavior. This has now been amply confirmed
through the presence of chaos in planetary and asteroid orbits, and there
is widespraed interest in collisions between planet-crossing trajectories
and the planets themselves.
Solar System simulations have also predicted that many of the planets
may be able to host Trojan type objects. So far, the Mars Trojan
1990MB = Eureka is the only known object in this class. A new type of
stable Solar System orbit has also recently been identified, and its
stability analysis has been expedited with an algebraic manipulator,
working together with classical perturbation theory.
The presentation will conclude with other results in the terrestrial
region, on the importance of the discovery of nearby planetary
systems, and the outlook for the future.